The Nakba Files spoke to Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, member and former chair of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation, and a long-time France-based Palestine solidarity activist, about connections and comparisons between racism in Palestine/Israel and the USA.

Jehad Abu Salim: For Palestinians, the fence around the Gaza Strip evokes the Nakba, the refugee struggle, and the occupation. The fence, as a physical barrier to refugee return, was the beginning of the tragedy. The fence today is its continuation. And since the fence caused the problem, the solution must include its removal. The fence is the history that Palestinians in Gaza never want to forget, and no amount of aid can induce them to do so.

Lauren Banko: The systematic exclusion of Arab migration from Israel/Palestine did not begin with the 1948 Nakba. Instead, it is rooted in specific understandings of race and nationality enshrined in the international legal agreements that laid the framework for the colonial state of the British Mandate of Palestine, the state inherited by the Zionist movement.

In 2011, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) circulated a draft Palestinian Nationality Law as part of its efforts to achieve international recognition of Palestine’s status as a state. The Nakba Files spoke to Dr. Mutaz Qafisheh, the dean of Hebron University’s College of Law & Political Science and a principal drafter of the bill. Qafisheh is the author of a study on the international law foundations of Palestinian citizenship.

In Israeli political discourse, the issue of African asylum seekers and the question of Palestine are largely seen as disconnected from one another. Yet the contours of Israel’s asylum regime and, by extension, its anti-Blackness and mistreatment of African migrants, cannot be understood in isolation from the Nakba and its laws.

The Green Line runs between the villages of Lifta and Beit Iksa but also ties them together. As a porous and contingent boundary, the Green Line is a reminder that the Zionist project has always needed the flexibility to choose, combine, and discard different legal regimes in order to carry out its aims and to produce justifications for its actions.